If you haven’t yet decided on a book to review for the course, you may want to consider one of the surprisingly large number of good and interesting books focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country’s history is replete with conflict and tragedy: in the late 19th century it was claimed by King Leopold of Belgium as his own personal property, and he ruled the territory with particular brutality, using the forced labor of local people to collect rubber and make himself very wealthy indeed (This period of the country’s history is superbly told by Adam Hochschild in his 1999 book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.)
From the moment it became independent in 1960 the country faced both internal conflict and external intervention. After an unsuccessful attempt by the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga to secede, the country’s leftward-leaning leader was killed and his government overthrown in a coup. The new leader, a military officer named Joseph Mobutu, was backed by the U.S., which saw the Congo as a strategically important place in the context of the Cold War (see the 2007 book Chief of Station: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone, by Larry Devlin.)
Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and modestly changed his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (“The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.”) Mobutu’s tyrannical rule and its disastrous consequences for the country are document in Michala Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (2000.)
In the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Rwanda into Zaire, bringing instability and conflict with them. The conflict resulted in the overthrow of Mobutu in 1997 by Rwandan-backed forces, and the country’s named was changed to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, conflict has continued to devastate the country, and by some estimates more than 5 million people have lost their lives as a direct or indirect result of the conflict.
During the years of conflict, what meager infrastructure the Belgian colonists had built in Congo deteriorated: roads fell into disrepair, rail lines into disuse, and buildings degenerated into rubble. The results of this are documented by Tim Butcher, who undertook the daunting task of crossing DRC on a motorcycle and surprisingly lived to tell the tale in his 2008 book Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World’s Most Dangerous Country.
These are just a few of the good books written about the DRC; how about tackling one of them?
